Beyond the Rift
Authors: Peter Watts
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Collections & Anthologies, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Fiction
Praise for
Starfish
(A
New York Times
Notable Book)
“Fizzing with ideas, and glued together with dark psychological
tensions: an exciting debut.”
—
Kirkus
“Watts makes a brilliant debut with a novel that is part undersea
adventure, part psychological thriller, and wholly original.”
—
Booklist
“No one has taken this premise to such pitiless lengths—and depths—
as Watts.”
—
New York Times
Praise for
Blindsight
“Intellectually challenging....”
—
Publishers Weekly
, starred review
“Watts continues to challenge readers with his imaginative plots and superb storytelling.”
—
Library Journal
“A brilliant piece of work, one that will delight fans of hard science fiction, but will also demonstrate to literary fans that contemporary science fiction is dynamic and fascinating literature that demands to be read.”
—The Edmonton Journal
Also by Peter Watts
Novels
The Rifters Trilogy
Starfish
(1999)
Maelstrom
(2001)
βehemoth
(2004)
(Published in two volumes as
βehemoth: β-Max
and
βehemoth: Seppuku
)
Blindsight
(2006)
Crysis: Legion
(2011)
Echopraxia
(forthcoming 2014)
Collections
Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes
(2002)
PETER WATTS
BEYOND THE RIFT
TACHYON / SAN FRANCISCO
Beyond the Rift
Copyright © 2013 by Peter Watts
This is a work of collected fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.
“Outtro: En Route to Dystopia with the Angry Optimist” copyright © 2013 by Peter Watts
Cover art “Undersea” copyright © 2013 by Hugh Sicotte
Cover and interior design by Elizabeth Story
Tachyon Publications
1459 18th Street #139
San Francisco, CA 94107
(415) 285-5615
www.tachyonpublications.com
Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
Project Editor: Jill Roberts
BOOK ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-125-1
Printed in the United States of America by Worzalla
First Edition: 2013
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“The Things” copyright © 2010 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
Clarkesworld
#40, January 2010.
“The Island” copyright © 2009 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
The New Space Opera 2
, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan (HarperCollins: New York).
“The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald” copyright © 1998 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
Divine Realms: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy
, edited by Susan MacGregor (Turnstone Press: Winnipeg, Canada).
“A Word for Heathens” copyright © 2004 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
ReVisions
, edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel (DAW: New York).
“Home” copyright © 2000 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
On Spec
#36, Spring 1999, Vol. 11 No. 1.
“The Eyes of God” copyright © 2008 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2
, edited by George Mann (Solaris: Nottingham, England).
“Flesh Made Word” copyright © 1994 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
Prairie Fire Magazine
Vol. 15, #2.
“Nimbus” copyright © 1994 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
On Spec
#17, Summer 1994, Vol. 6 No. 2.
“Mayfly” copyright © 2005 by Peter Watts and Derryl Murphy. First appeared in
Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Science Fiction
, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy: Calgary, Canada).
“Ambassador” copyright © 2002 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes
(EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing: Calgary, Canada).
“Hillcrest v. Velikovsky” copyright © 2008 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
Nature
#454, 550, July 23, 2008.
“Repeating the Past” copyright © 2007 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
Nature
#450, 760, November 28, 2007.
“A Niche” copyright © 1990 by Peter Watts. First appeared in
Tesseracts 3
, edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott (Porcépic Books: Victoria, British Columbia).
CONTENTS
The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald
Outtro: En Route to Dystopia with The Angry Optimist
THE THINGS
I
am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.
I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.
I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.
The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.
I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.
The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.
There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called
Clarke
; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.
I will go into the storm, and never come back.
I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.
So much wisdom I had. So much experience. Now I cannot remember all the things I knew. I can only remember that I once knew them.
I remember the crash, though. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but a little crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice. By the time I’d regained control of what was left the fires had died and the cold was closing back in. I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep my cells from bursting before the ice took me.
I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, the first embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as my cells thawed, as body and soul embraced after their long sleep. I remember the biped offshoots that surrounded me, the strange chittering sounds they made, the odd
uniformity
of their body plans. How ill-adapted they looked! How
inefficient
their morphology! Even disabled, I could see so many things to fix. So I reached out. I took communion. I tasted the flesh of the world—
—and the world attacked me. It
attacked
me.
I left that place in ruins. It was on the other side of the mountains—the
Norwegian camp
, it is called here—and I could never have crossed that distance in a biped skin. Fortunately there was another shape to choose from, smaller than the biped but better adapted to the local climate. I hid within it while the rest of me fought off the attack. I fled into the night on four legs, and let the rising flames cover my escape.
I did not stop running until I arrived here. I walked among these
new offshoots wearing the skin of a quadruped; and because they had not seen me take any other shape, they did not attack.
And when I assimilated them in turn—when my biomass changed and flowed into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes—I took that communion in solitude, having learned that the world does not like what it doesn’t know.
I am alone in the storm. I am a bottom-dweller on the floor of some murky alien sea. The snow blows past in horizontal streaks; caught against gullies or outcroppings, it spins into blinding little whirlwinds. But I am not nearly far enough, not yet. Looking back I still see the camp crouching brightly in the gloom, a squat angular jumble of light and shadow, a bubble of warmth in the howling abyss.